The Effects of Color

When you look out the window, you see the world is full of colors: green money, yellow sun, blue water, black roads, red stop signs. Without realizing it, however, we are greatly effected by the commonsight of the colors of certain objects. We are brought up in a society that strongly attaches color to certain sensation. We associate them with
moods (grey=gloomy, blue=sad, yellow=happy, red=love), feelings (red=hot, blue=cool), and actions (green=go, red=stop, yellow=yield). Of course these can change slightly frm person to person or culture to culture, it depends on events in our history, but over all these are common associations with such colors. It is interesting to walk the streets, as we did today, to see how these color combinations are often used. Most of the time, the color schemes make sense, but every so often we can encounter one that makes us question the owners choice.
The first object I encountered was a yellow school bus. I found this to be a perfect color for a bus. It is a bright color, which would make a child happier. It is also the color commonly associated with yield. This also makes sense because other drivers should find the bus clearly visible and maybe even want to slow down because one wants to be careful while driving around with children. Because commonly we do not run into a lot of yellow cars, the bus is also more distinct on the road.
Next there were two objects who's color schemes did not make sense to me. First there was the banks colors which consisted of blue and white. I found this to be an odd choice for a bank. Commonly people would thinks of banks using green because money is the color green. Perhaps though they wanted the bank to seem calming and peaceful, like they would be trustworthy, so this could possibly be why they would choose to use the color scheme, although personally I do not find it an appealing color for a bank.
There was also a liquor store painted gray and used white. These colors found to be even more unappealing then the banks colors. While one in there mind may associate a liquor store with dirtiness, the store owner should want to make their store look more appealing. Maybe they would want to associate it with party colors so they could have used yellow or red or green or some kind of bright colors, like the festive party store down the street from the liquor store.



The last distinct object I found was a building who's color scheme was brown and gold. It was for an antique store. Gold and brown are an excellent color for an antique store for three reasons. The colors make me think of furniture, older objects, and desrable pricey objects. Although antiques do not necessarily y have to be expensive, brown paired with gold seems more desirable old fashioned colors.